The Sassanians were Zoroastrians

The leader of the Sassanians, by 227 AD the king of the Parthian Empire, was named Ardashir. (The Greeks and Romans called him Artaxerxes.) He organized a very strong and unified government. Then he took the army and invaded Roman territory in West Asia. Neither side won a clear victory, and this set the pattern for the next four hundred years. There was a lot of fighting but no real change in the borders.

Sassanian law code

Like other people around the Mediterranean and West Asia at this time – and both influenced by and influencing Roman law codes like Ulpian’s Digest about 211 AD, or Justinianic Digest of 534 AD, and the Talmud’s Gemara published about the same time – the Sassanids published collections of legal rulings. The earliest are commentaries on the Zoroastrian Avesta, written no later than the 300s AD. The greatest of these Sassanian digests was the Book of a Thousand Judgments, about 620 AD.

Fort of Kaser-e-Pishkamar (thanks to Stuart Denison)

During the 400s AD, Central Asian White Huns started attacking Iran from the north, just as the Huns attacked the Roman Empire at the same time. To keep them out, the Sassanians built a Great Wall, like the earlier Great Wall of China, ten meters wide and three meters high, all along their northern border – about 200 kilometers long. But the White Huns conquered eastern Iran anyway. It took the Sassanians until about 550 AD to push them out again.

Islam conquers the Sassanians

Gradually the Romans and the Sassanians both got in the habit of paying Arab mercenaries from the Arabian Peninsula to fight most of their battles for them. And in the 600s AD, those Arab mercenaries decided to fight on their own account instead. They easily conquered both the Romans and the Sassanians, and established the Islamic Empire.

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